Inspiring Me.

This past week I had an experience that sums up so much of how the workplace and the rest of my life operates here in the Philippines. Wednesday, I was asked by my co-workers to be the keynote speaker for the graduation recognition ceremony coming up at our center. Since I was asked around noon on Wednesday, and since the ceremony wasn’t scheduled until 4 PM on Thursday, this gave me twenty-seven preparation hours for the speech. In the Philippines, twenty-seven hours is seen as ample time. With a lot of persuasion, I accepted the task, knowing that it would further help with my integration into the workplace. As my co-workers were having a hard time understanding why I was a bit nervous or stressed about the speech, I kindly tried to explain that first, I don’t exactly enjoy public speaking as much as Filipinos do, and second, usually if I am going to write a speech, I am given much longer than twenty-seven hours to write it. I find that sometimes explaining things about my typical workstyle or about American culture and working environment helps me to feel better and hopefully helps them to see that I am not, in fact, a crazy woman, but rather, I’m just American. On a side note, it is difficult to do this without sounding like, “Well, in America we do this….” Or “In America…”, but hopefully it helps to explain my seemingly neurotic personality at times!

The time for the recognition ceremony on Thursday came, and by that time I had thought of many ideas for my speech. The only instructions I had were, “Be inspiring. Tell them why you are the way you are”. I hope that these words were indicating that I was successful, but then again, who knows? They could have meant that I should instruct the kids on how to be very serious, or how to dress a bit sloppy, or how to be tall, or how to be always focusing on work and deadlines, or how to manage myself with such a long nose. Who knows? But I assumed that this meant successful, and I went with it. Leading up to speech time, I still wasn’t quite sure what I was going to say. The theme song of the recognition ceremony happened to be “Time of my Life” by David Cook, and sitting and listening to the song over and over again before the ceremony (practicing pressing the play button, perhaps?), I noticed the lyrics. The first line is, “I’ve been waiting for my dreams to turn into something.” Well, since this was the theme song of the ceremony, and since I was planning on talking about dreams of some sort anyways, bingo. So, my question for the graduates was, “Why are you WAITING for you dreams? Why not start them today?” Of course there was a lot of accompanying messages, but that was the overall gist. Inspiring? Not sure. But hey, with twenty-seven hours to prepare something, I think I did alright.

"I could definitely live HERE..."

A few weeks ago, a group of friends and I headed on a quick two-day vacation to visit Malapascua, a tiny island off the tip of Cebu. The island is home to white beaches, small friendly resorts, and only walking paths. We were thinking it would be a pretty great time, but we were still a little bit surprised when the weekend turned out to amazing and flawless. The beaches were spectacular and so quiet that we practically had the whole place to ourselves. The people on Malapascua were definitely some of the most friendly and helpful that I have met so far in the Philippines, and the kids especially were pretty cool. A lot of people go to Malapascua for some great diving, but since none of us are divers, you might be wondering what we did that made it so fantastic. Well, to be honest, we did nothing. Nothing!

Saturday morning, we boarded a 4 AM bus heading north and arrived at the port we needed a little after 7 AM. After waiting around for awhile for a ferry, and subsequently deciding to just arrange a special trip with some other groups that were waiting as well, we took a half-hour boat to the island of Malapascua. The boat anchored ashore, we balanced ourselves on the narrow gangplank, and we found our feet in soft white sand. The two days were filled with laying in the sun, reading, napping in the shade, floating in the water, eating, and enjoying each other’s company. We played Catchphrase, talked social issues, and learned about each other. To sum it up, it was amazing and I can’t wait to go back.

Enjoy some pictures!

Promise :)

Update...tomorrow...it's on the to-do list for my day off, so it WILL get done!